1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to systems and methods for the display of product information in or about a store. In particular, systems and methods are provided that use information from an in-store communication network to display product information at designated points within or about a store including, for example, retail shelves or product displays. In exemplary embodiments of the systems and methods herein, a thermal printhead selectively heats and creates product information on rewritable thermochromatic paper at the product display.
2. Description of the Related Art
Product information in the form of price tags, end displays, labels, etc. are critical in helping consumers make a decision about purchasing a product. Warehouses also use product information along with retrieval and location information to determine pertinent information about a product. While the placement of product information is invaluable across the different applications, the display of product information for products or items within a location can be costly due to expenses associated with the labor required, printing and delivery, materials, and the like. Retailers, including grocery stores, convenience stores, clothing stores, consumer goods stores, specialty stores, and manufacturing facilities, spend a significant amount of time and money each week updating product information, including for example, prices, regarding each product. A single store in a supermarket chain may require about 10,000 new labels each week. At a cost of about 70 cents per label, including printing services and labor, updating product tags on shelving is a costly expense to supermarkets.
The current state of the art includes producing updated product labels at a store or at an off-store location each week, shipping the updated product labels to the store, and distributing the updated product labels to store personnel. Such system is fraught with the potential for error. It requires enormous costs associated with the printing and shipping of the product tags. Errors in printing lead to discarded paper, material, and manpower hours.
Scores of store personnel are required to inspect a location and install product information at different product displays. Such store personnel are needed to first review and confirm product information such as, for example, sale prices or Universal Product Code (UPC) codes. Once the product information has been inspected, reviewed, and confirmed, the product information is cross-checked manually by store personnel to ensure that the product information posted for the respective items or products is accurate. If not, the store personnel will obtain the updated product information which will then be printed and installed.
Then, the store personnel manually inspect remove the outdated product tags from each shelf's frame, tear perforated dotted lines to obtain individual product tags, and replace outdated product tags with the updated product tags containing the updated product information. The overall process is inefficient, labor-intensive and costly.
What is needed is a system and method wherein the product tags are automatically updated without the aid of individual store clerks. The prior art includes solutions to the problem such as RFID labels. However, the mechanical vulnerability of the RFID-inlay is higher than the ordinary label. RFID labels have a higher cost than ordinary labels. Thus, retailers who purchase RFID labels often justify the expense by using RFID labels on agglomerations of more than one product, and using regular labels on individual products. Also, RFID labels included in these solutions are easily damaged, and depending on the angle of sight, are hard to read by individuals. Furthermore, such systems require significant amounts of power since the displays are in operation the majority of the time.
As such, there is a need for systems and methods for the display of product information that is efficient, cost-effective, less labor intensive, and less power consumption. There is also a need for a less materially wasteful system for displaying product information that also avoids the weekly tasks of sorting, installation and removal of product tags.